Kachapuri and kebabs

So, I'm back from my travels. For a while, at least. Georgia was, er, interesting. Sometimes genuinely interesting, sometimes more in the nature of Chinese curse interesting.

We landed at Tbilisi airport at one in the morning and were whisked straight to the hotel, so I couldn't tell very much about where we were apart from the fact that everyone seemed to drive on whichever side of the road they felt like at any one time. The trip between airport and hotel seemed like a game of four-wheeled chicken.

After a few gentle hours of sight-seeing the next day, we were taken out for dinner to one of Tbilisi's best restaurants by the organisers of the wine competition I was there to judge. Dinner was delicious: lots of good, fresh, herby salads; a couple of kinds of cheeses – one similar to a slightly tough mozzarella, the other somewhat like feta; a dish of lamb stewed with herbs and sour plums and a minced lamb kebab enlivened with barberries and pomegranate seeds. Our host for the evening, a genial politician whose smile didn't quite reach his eyes, appointed himself tamada, or toastmaster, for the evening and raised his glass every eight minutes on average, with a new theme. We drank to Georgia, to women, to absent partners, to international co-operation, to marriage, to the success of the next few days' judging... to so many things, in fact, that I lost track of what I was toasting, despite the fact that I was only taking very small sips of the wine in my glass. Apparently we got off lightly: the true Georgian tradition is that you drain your glass at each toast.

After a press conference the next day (it would seem that a wine competition is big news in Georgia, meriting exposure in the national newspaper and the evening news on TV), we set off for Sighnagi, the village where the competition would actually be held. Sighnagi, it turns out, is a bit of Potemkin village, designed to attract tourist dollars to help shore up Georgia's rather feeble economy. The trouble with Sighnagi as a tourist destination (apart from the glossy Disneyland-esque quality of the village, which stands in complete contrast to the poverty of all the other villages I passed through) is that it only has one hotel and two restaurants.

The hotel was truly abysmal. I picked five dead flies off the synthetic carpet in my room (the very same carpet that sent out sparks of static electricity with every footfall) and flushed them down the loo. What I couldn't get rid of was the mouldy smell in my room – it was like sleeping in a corked bedroom. It was so bad that the only way I could fall asleep at night was by dousing myself in perfume to over-ride the damp aromas.

As for the restaurants, on the first night we visited Sighnagi's 'French' restaurant, where we were served by the place's one waitress, a bored teenager who was obviously pissed off that we (the only table of diners) had prevented her from bunking off early to hook up with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend may well have been the chef, whose sole function was to open cans and tip the contents onto a plate. Actually, I lie. He was also responsible for my 'pork chops with spinach', which turned out to be two meatless spare ribs doused in vinegar and a salt pan's worth of salt, accompanied by four burned balls of spinach that had been cooked hours earlier and left to go cold.

I have to admit to having had a bloody good cry that night after I got off the phone to Mark. So much for the glamour of my life as a wine writer...

Things got mildly better the next day. The competition helped to take my mind off my surroundings (we tasted 180 or so wines and 12 chachas – local grape brandy) and we discovered the town's other restaurant, which served authentic Georgian dishes. In practice, this meant a plate of herbs, spring onions and radishes, more of the salty, feta-like cheese, more kebabs and kachapuri, a kind of Georgian cheese pizza. While it wasn't haute cuisine, it was better than what was on offer at the French restaurant, so that's what we ate for lunch and dinner for the next three days.

I've never yearned for home more than I did last week. Mark, bless him, came to pick me up from the airport and proudly announced that he was cooking me dinner to welcome me home. He'd planned on making lamb burgers and salad, but I just couldn't face more minced lamb and salad. We went out for a Chinese meal instead.

Off on my travels again

I might not be able to make any kind of posting for the next week or so because I'm about to fly out to Georgia (that's former Soviet Union Georgia rather than Georgia, USA) to help judge a wine competition. I'll be gone until next Saturday, and I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to get any kind of internet connection while I'm out there – or even if I'll be given any spare time to do so.

When I get back, I hope to be able to make an interesting posting about eating and drinking in the Wild East.

Istanbul (not Constantinople)

Last weekend, Mark and I took my mum to Istanbul for her 70th birthday present (she's probably going to kill me for revealing her age – she discovered this blog because she was googling me. How embarrassing!).

Because it was a special occasion, we stayed in style at the Empress Zoe hotel, a lovely little boutique Byzantine job in the middle of old Istanbul, just round the corner form key tourist venues like the Topkapi Palace, the Ayia Sophia mosque and (inevitably) the Grand Bazaar.

Shopping played a relatively large part of the weekend (something Mark bore with remarkable fortitude, standing patiently by the door of shop after shop, with an ever-growing pile of bags clustered at his feet). I was relatively restrained, and returned home with an embroidered coat and a pair of shoes made from an old piece of hand-embroidered material (Laszlo has already had a good gnaw on one of them, but only managed to damage the sole, luckily).

We also spent a fair amount of time strolling through the Spice Bazaar. As a matter of fact, I think I preferred the Spice Bazaar to the Grand Bazaar: it smelled more interesting for starters, with its blend of sumac, cinnamon, thyme and rosewater. I almost bought a kilo's worth of mixed spice, and only managed to restrain myself in time (I've got all the spices I need at home in my kitchen), and mum couldn't resist buying bags and bags of almonds, dried fruit and loukoum – she said it was for presents, but I'm not convinced she wasn't intending to scoff half the goodies when she got home.

We ate well, too – although, as I discovered, a girl can have too many kebabs over the course of a long weekend. Our best meal, however, was the one we enjoyed at Körfez (left). Part of the treat was the drive through Istanbul's suburbs, from gritty inner-town concrete jungle to upmarket Hampstead-on-sea beachfront apartments, followed by the short boat ride across the Bosphorous to the restaurant. We sat down for dinner just before sunset, and as the starters arrived, the lights of the city started twinkling and soon all we could see of the opposite shore was a galaxy of lights and the vague outlines of the hills and buildings. The food was excellent, too, particularly the sea bass baked in a salt crust (although we suspect we were ripped off as they only served us half the fish but charged us for a whole one when the bill came).

Luckily, after an attempt to order a couple of glasses of wine on the first night, I wasn't too tempted afterwards. They were the worst wines I've tasted since I went to Cyprus on a work trip...